


Little Separate Incidents

by heddychaa



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Children of Earth Fix-It, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-26
Updated: 2010-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:32:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heddychaa/pseuds/heddychaa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's June 26th, 2010 and Ianto Jones is alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Separate Incidents

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cruentum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruentum/gifts).



> The title and the epigraph are both from Virginia Woolf's _To the Lighthouse_. azn_jack_fiend beta-d it and generally listened to my bitching, because she's amazing and also possibly a saint.

_The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.  
\- Virginia Woolf_

June 26th, 2010

It's raining and all he has is the suit he died in, and not even the jacket, at that.

Rhiannon opens the door.

Fringe plastered to his forehead, he says, "I lost my job," and, "My boyfriend and I broke up," too quick for her to question, too quick for her to argue.

She touches his jaw. It's meant to look like compassion, but he sees it for what it is. Some part of her understands he shouldn't be here; some part of her still keeps grief and recognizes the odd, accidental miracle that has brought him home.

In the front hallway, buffered by coats on hooks and strewn wellies, she pulls him close, guides his nose to her shoulder with a hand at the back of his head. For a minute there, nothing exists but the sound of them breathing, the sound of the rain.

She tells him, "It's alright, now."

\--

Sometimes when she's on her way out, when she doesn't have the kids or Johnny distracting her or nagging her on, like say when she goes to get groceries of a Tuesday afternoon, she'll turn around and look at him on the couch, her eyes screwed up like she expects him to be a mirage, like she expects him to vanish right there under her nose. Like she knows, somehow, that this can't be real.

Sometimes he feels the same way.

The days pass by and nothing ever happens. He sits on the couch in Rhiannon's living room and watches daytime telly, makes the family supper and cleans up around the house to make himself useful, goes through the motions of living his life, such as it is. Keeps busy. Deep down inside him, though, he's waiting. Like nicking that Lucozade at fifteen, he feels like he's living on stolen time and at any moment, any moment now, someone will finally find him out and take it all away. The thought paralyzes him.

Until one day in the midst of washing the dishes he says to himself, to the shiny streaks of water and suds up his arms, "But not today."

\--

He gets a job in a coffee shop. He wears an apron. He steams up soy lattes and doles out extra pumps of vanilla and pulls espresso. Sometimes he laughs at himself. Sometimes he swallows down the urge to tear his own hair and scream and take tazers to heads, usually when customers are particularly condescending.

One afternoon a man comes in who takes his coffee just like Jack's. He's tall and blond and maybe a little gangly, but he has a nice smile. Ianto scrawls his number across the side of his cup. Later he rolls his eyes at himself in the mirror of the staff bathroom. Who _does_ that, really? Did he trip and fall into a romantic comedy?

He sees the man only once, and it devolves into a quick, breathless shag on the man's couch, not even intimate enough to take it to the bedroom. Turns out coffee preferences are _not_ , in fact, a good basis for a relationship. Ianto doesn't even remember his name. In his head he calls him "Americano black with two sugars." His mouth tasted of cigarettes.

\--

He goes jogging every morning through the lifting fog in an attempt to lose the last of his Torchwood/Jack weight. On the street corner he stops with his hands on his knees waiting for the light to change, huffing out white clouds of breath and listening to the sound of passing cars underneath the Eminem ft. Rihanna that pumps out of his earbuds. He loads his iPod with top forty shit; he feels obliged to, now that he has time to pay attention to that sort of thing.

Getting his own flat is expensive on a coffee shop salary, but he sets a strict budget and sticks to it. He stops eating takeaway and loses ten pounds. He makes friends with his coworkers and goes drinking with them every Friday. Over pints they riff about the BNP and Lindsay Lohan going to jail. His coworkers ask him all about himself and it winds up he has nothing he feels right telling them, so he says he just got out of a fucked-up relationship and he's still figuring himself out. It makes the girls who work afternoon shift swoon over him.

He sleeps with Aoife, who works closing, four times within a two week period, and then he breaks it off. She quits. He sends her flowers.

He grows a goatee and then shaves it on a whim. He dyes his hair blond. He leaves the suit he died in at the back of his closet tucked behind his winter jumpers. At first he digs it out every so often to stroke the silk of the tie, trying to remember what it felt like to put it on, trying to remember the motions of tying a thousand half-windsor knots. The memory of his last day, putting on this suit, standing with Jack in front of that blue tank, the smell of Jack in the elevator up to the thirteenth floor, is fading, some dream from a life he never lived. Eventually he can't stand to even look at the suit, can't reconcile its existence, what it symbolizes, with the life he's living. He doesn't throw it out, but he does put a garbage bag over the hanger. Out of sight, out of mind.

At the next family dinner at Rhiannon's, Johnny calls him a poof for dying his hair. "Gonna pierce your nipples next, gayboy?" That word sends his two realities, his two histories, scraping across each other like nails on chalkboard.

The next week he invites Aoife along.

\--

He and Aoife get along pretty well, for two people who came together under questionable pretenses. They have Bond marathons in her flat (he doesn't disown her for liking Roger Moore best, but he does give her the side-eye). He gains five pounds from ordering Chinese with her.

He texts her on his break, stupid shite like "What panties are you wearing?" and "Can you tape Graham Norton tonight?" and "Some American prat just ordered a 'Venti'. Does this look like fucking Starbucks?"

There's some kind of extraterrestrial crisis in California one lousy Friday and the two of them stay in, watch it on the BBC back at hers. He thinks he sees the back of Gwen's head behind some police tape, but he can't be sure. The light of the telly plays out on Aoife's freckled face. With her eyes full of aliens, she says, "I just don't understand the world anymore." It makes him laugh.

For his thirtieth birthday she buys him an espresso machine. For some reason it makes him so annoyed he sulks right through his entire party. Of course, maybe it's not the stupid gift, which he has to admit was thoughtful, if a little misguided. Maybe it's the fact that he never thought he'd make it to thirty, and now that he's here it just feels like a big colossal let-down.

When they get back to his place that night, stumbling drunk and talking in shouts, she gives him a birthday blowjob while he leans against the front door. The raised edge of the peephole digs into the back of his head. He decides it's not all bad.

\--

He doesn't ask her to marry him. Sitting at the table in their flat, still in his wrinkled work clothes, she smiles at him from across the risotto she's cooked and her eyes are brown and her lips are bubblegum pink and if he focuses he can see the shape of each freckle across her nose, the length of each tilted red-gold eyelash. When she talks, she gestures with her fork, jabs at the air between them playfully and meaningfully, with conviction. She never talks with her mouth full, but instead just blushes and covers her mouth with her fingers and rolls her eyes in an exaggerated 'waiiit for it' gesture.

Loving her isn't simple, but it is direct. She never asks of him what he can't give, and she never expects things she doesn't ask for. It's uncomplicated, egalitarian, and any games she plays are ones he already knows the rules to.

She washes, he dries. Shoulder-to-shoulder, their sleeves pushed to their elbows, she hums and he imitates her humming, and she lets out a treacherous frustrated laugh and slaps a handful of bubbles into the centre of his chest. So he whips her with his towel, right across her plump little arse, and she shrieks, and soon they're chasing each other around the table, knocking over chairs.

He fucks her with single-minded intensity, watching her face, watching her eyes flutter closed and her teeth worrying over her lower lip. He fucks her like she's the only person he's ever loved.

Even when it's not life and death he's still an all-or-nothing guy. He's accepted that about himself.

\--

He thinks it'll be easy to lie to her. Sometimes it is. He tells her before the coffee shop he worked in London, meaningless government job, white-collar bollocks. He tells her he got a transfer to a Cardiff office, and he thought at first that it was a promotion but then he just ended up just fetching the coffee, a faceless PA, and he figured since all he was doing was pulling espresso anyway, he might as well do it somewhere he doesn't have to wear a suit and keep another man's agenda.

He's just got home from a split shift, dropped boneless down beside her on the couch and is untying his trainers when she says, no preamble,

"There's a suit hidden at the back of your closet."

It cuts him right down to his intestines. He tries not to stiffen too visibly, but when he sits up again she's giving him a level look, searching his face for something. He turns away like he wants to see what she's got muted on the telly.

"I told you I used to work a white-collar job," he tries, inwardly floundering. He looks her in the eye as he says it, to make himself seem sincere. "It's from that."

"Why'd you keep it then?" she needles. "You didn't keep any other old clothes."

He takes a deep breath through his nose. It doesn't help.

"I don't fucking know, because maybe sometimes even blokes who work at fucking coffee shops need a suit? Weddings? Job interviews?"

"Well then you won't mind that I took it to the cleaner's," she says, prim, pretending like she hasn't just said it to gauge his response. "It was wrinkled. And it smelled bad. Like, _musty_ bad."

"You didn't!" he snarls back without thinking. He nearly jumps from the couch to make sure, but stops himself so the motion is limited to a reactionary jerk in his seat like he's been electrocuted. His mind is circling thoughts of the suit, the smell of it, the little wrinkles of his last day of his old life, echoes of movement and touch and _him_ , the man he used to be.

"You never tell me anything about yourself," she accuses, changing tactics, and the petulance doesn't look good on her. She blinks at him, slow and expectant. He almost expects her to put out her hand so he can guiltily place his lie in the centre of her palm.

"Sure I do," he counters. His heart thumps in his chest. "You know my favourite band. You know I'm a snob about my coffee. You know I'd rather bash my head against the wall than watch 'Little Britain'. You know my trouser size." He counts it all off on his fingertips. He means to kill her with cold, manly logic, so he seals it with a dismissive eye-roll like he can't believe she'd ever suggest such a thing.

"I meant your past," she elaborates. "I meant something a little more intimate than how you take your coffee. You know, like why an unsentimental man like you would keep a wrinkled old suit in a plastic bag at the back of his closet."

He snorts. "Maybe there just isn't that much to tell. Maybe I don't talk about myself because there's nothing important to say."

She just stares back at him, hard-eyed and tight-jawed, the expression of someone who won't be dissuaded.

He needs to give her something.

"There was a. . . girl. You know how I said I came out of a bad relationship? Yeah well, my ex is _dead_." The _Happy now?_ is there, implicated by his tone. "Lisa. I worked with her in London and then she died. That's when I took the transfer." The petulance probably doesn't look too good on _him_ , either.

She recoils like he's slapped her, fury and pity warring across her expression. _Jesus, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!_ and _Why the hell didn't you tell me?_

"And anyway," he rambles, "It's not _hidden_ , it's just _put away_."

\--

 _Re: J. Harkness_

Dear Mr. Jones:

You don't know me, but I'm hoping that we have a mutual acquaintance. I'm not sure if your even the right "Ianto Jones" but since it was quite hard to track you down, I'm hoping that you are..

My name is Steven Carter, and I think we can help each other. I want to ask you about 12/09/2009.

If that date means nothing to you, please delete this message.

\- S

He deletes the email. Then he shuts down his account.

An hour later, he returns to the computer and wipes the hard drive, just to be safe. He loses 4,379 mp3s, a slew of photos that Aoife will have duplicates of anyway, and the latest copy of his CV.

It makes him miss Tosh.

\--

His mam used to say "Things get worse before they get better". After the shock of the initial confession wears off enough for her to be more angry than pitying, Aoife turns suspicious, her every waking moment seemingly dedicated to planning inopportune moments for asking him prying questions in an attempt to catch him off guard. When he doesn't give her what she's looking for, instead resorting to a grunted mantra of "I don't want to talk about it", she turns the suspicion to bitterness.

It starts innocuously enough, little things like shutting the door to the bedroom behind her when she goes before him. It escalates to sorting the dirty dishes and only washing her own and, when it's her turn to cook, picking recipes she knows he won't eat. Her passive-aggressive warfare soon escalates to levelling him a bored look every time he tells a joke, and then, when he talks, imitating his accent. A Dubliner doing a Welshman is about as awful as you'd expect.

She can't even _guess_ at the truth of the matter, can't even conceptualize it as a possibility, so after three weeks of torture, she finally accuses him of cheating.

He doesn't fight her on it. Doesn't raise his voice, doesn't tell her she's being irrational, doesn't defend his honour in any way. He just scrapes his chair back from the table, collects his coat from the back of the couch, and leaves.

He winds up at that bar Owen used to go pulling at on his nights off. When he's had a few too many, he starts considering the option of proving Aoife right, because why not?

He shakes his head, decides to spend the night on Rhiannon's couch instead.

He wakes up to a crick in his neck and his phone beeping a text: "Sorry babe just being paranoid. We need to talk."

\--

"I love you!" he bursts out, like he's afraid if he takes too long to say it he'll turn coward halfway through.

She looks up from where she's dunking a teabag in her mug and a small, surprised smile twitches across her lips.

"I love you too, Ianto!" she lilts, glowing.

\--

"We're going to get some milk!" he narrates in a singsong, leaning into the refrigerator and fumbling through the cartons for one with a later expiration date. "Milk for Ava!"

He hears a laugh behind him and whips around, milk carton clutched in his hand.

Jack Harkness is crouched at the head of his trolley, smiling and pinching at Ava's dangling feet. But his eyes, sparkling positively wicked, are on Ianto. Ianto who can't figure out whether to hug him or shoot him. He settles for plucking Ava from the front of the trolley and hoisting her up against his chest one-armed, frowning suspiciously.

Jack straightens with a crack of his knees. Tucks his hands self-consciously into the pockets of his great coat.

Ava squirms in Ianto's arms frantic as he drops the milk carton into the basket of the trolley.

"You've gone grey a little. At the temples," Jack says, gesturing to his own. _You're alive. You're really alive._

"You haven't," Ianto counters. _You really don't age._ Ava drags a drooly palm down over his mouth and chin with a meaningless stream of "Dadadadadadada."

"Good looking as ever," Jack agrees, aiming for that casual egotism he does so well but hitting hollow. It makes him seem lonely. He makes a college try at focusing on Ianto's face, but his eyes keep flickering down to Ava.

"Yes. Well." Ianto doesn't look at Jack's body, doesn't look at Jack's mouth, doesn't look at Jack's jaw, doesn't look at Jack's wrists. He winces when Ava lets out one of her signature ear-piercing shrieks.

Jack touches his ear with his middle finger; says, "Yeah, they do that. I don't know, it's a stage."

"I liked her better before she discovered screaming for fun," Ianto admits, relieved to be on neutral territory. Kids. He can talk about kids alright.

Jack steps forward. Ianto doesn't step back. He wants to gather Ava in close, but instead lets her twist around to see Jack, who smiles at her with all the charm he's got in him.

"Ava, you called her?" Jack asks.

"Yes," Ianto replies. "After Ava Gardner." He bites back the usual story about how Aoife had wanted to call her 'Saoirse'.

"Yours?" Jack prompts, a little hesitant. He reaches out to touch Ava's hair, combing his big fingers through the fine curls at the crown of her head.

Ianto swallows down a lump in his throat. Nods yes.

"She's ginger," Jack tries. Ava reaches above her head, pawing at Jack's fingers.

"So's her mother," Ianto retorts. It hurts him to say it. He doesn't want to be this man, just now, he wants to be the one Jack remembers, the busted up guilty pleasure, plaything, soldier, lover.

Jack's Adam's apple bobs. Something hot and masochistic curls and tightens in Ianto's belly. He pulls Ava-almost-Saoirse away from Jack and deposits her back in the trolley, doing up the strap at her waist with shaking but practiced fingers.

"Anyway," he says, and it comes out like begging. _Please let me go._

"Ianto," Jack gasps out, and Ianto feels Jack's blunt fingertips brush across the back of his hand. He draws it back, eyes wide, betrayed.

"Why are you here?" he chokes out. He can smell him, that warm spicy smell. Can hear him breathing.

"Martha told me--"

Ianto breaks eye contact, studying the neat rows of yogurt at Jack's back. "I'm working for UNIT, yeah. I needed the money for Ava, and my. . . 'work experience' isn't much good anywhere else."

They share a broken laugh. The refrigerators hum all around them.

"If you need money, Ianto--" Jack starts.

"No. _Fuck you._ No."

He wheels the trolley back to adjust its aim and marches past, all self-righteous indignation. His shoulder brushes the scratchy wool of Jack's sleeve.

\--

In the rear-view mirror, Ava burbles a finger across her lips clumsily _buh-buh-buh-buh-buh_. Ianto does it back, trying to crack a smile for her.

He ends up with his forehead on the steering wheel, crying.

\--

He strides across the length of the Plass, through the hazy changing colours of the lit pillars along either side. He can see Jack's back at one end of the oval, hunched over the railing overlooking the bay. His long legs are stretched out behind him, the bitter night sea air whipping the fabric of his trousers around his legs.

"You came," he says, not looking back, as Ianto nears him. For a moment Ianto has to shake off a feeling of unreality at his accent, only he'd forgotten just how American Jack sounds.

"I did," Ianto replies, coming to a stop just short of touching the toes of his trainers to Jack's bootheels. He's surprised by the sound of his own voice, much more firm and confident than he thought possible, under the circumstances. The wind picks it up and carries it east. "How did you know I would?"

"I didn't," Jack admits. "I took a leap of faith."

The water below is black, glittering with reflected light. Underneath the city sounds he can hear the rhythm of the waves, steady and sure.

He reaches out, fingers extended, like he's expecting to be burned. The wool of Jack's coat is warm beneath his fingertips, then his palm. It feels old and familiar, something he'd put away but never forgotten. Jack's muscles move under his hand, and for a moment he imagines, no, remembers, the feeling of Jack's skin stretching out slow as his ribcage expands, breathing.

He leans forward, falling against him chest-to-back. His forehead touches the back of Jack's neck. His arms reach to circle Jack's waist: his coat under Ianto's forearms is cinched closed, formal, guarded. Ianto lets out a sigh. He doesn't want this—no, he _shouldn't_ want this.

 _Why didn't you come for me earlier?_ he wants to ask, except that isn't the right question. But then Jack would reply, _Why didn't you tell me you were here?_

And that would be the right question.

"Wanna know a secret?" he murmurs into the hair at Jack's nape, smiling tremulously. Jack's belly clenches under his hands, his body going tense. Jack doesn't-shouldn't want this either.

"You're an auton?" Jack guesses, barking out a pained, awkward laugh.

Ianto's hands curl up across Jack's chest, fingers scraping. It makes Jack hiss through his teeth, arch against him.

"I thought that without you, _after_ you, life wouldn't have any meaning." They swallow together in time, synchronicity.

"And now?" Jack asks.


End file.
